Staff Musings

I’ve been a Staff Engineer at JET (Just Eat Takeaway) for about two years now. These are some musings about my experience.

Disclaimer: Not a true representation of what happens at work. The twins don’t like pizza.

Nobody understands what a Staff Engineer is or where they fit into the organisation. At least in my experience. I enter meetings, I introduce myself, I say I’m the Staff Engineer for this area, I get blank looks. The what? It makes no sense to people that aren’t already head deep in the Staff Engineer industry. Even though this should be a well understood term across the IT industry I feel as if it isn’t. At least in my experience.

We used to be called, in our company, Lead Engineers which made a lot more sense to people I interact with. “Oh who is leading that project?”, “Who’s the lead developer?”, “We should confirm this with leadership”. These are all deeply ingrained ways of talking and understanding roles for so many people that it just feels natural. At least in my experience. We have Lead BAs, Lead Project Managers, Senior Leadership, and we used to have Lead Engineers. It made hierarchical sense in a company and culture that is still deeply hierarchical (one a side note we have also adopted the Americanism of VPs, everyone and their aunt is a VP of something or other insert Homer Simpson joke here). So, at least in my experience, aligning with a lot of the rest of the industry knows at Staff Engineer level sounded like a really great move initially. But I have come to think it has done more harm than good because it has confused people as to where I am supposed to sit, what level of influence I should have, and crucially why I am there in the first place. Nobody bats an eyelid when the Lead Product Manager sits in on the meeting. But, hang about, what’s this Staff person doing here? Now I will caveat this heavily by noting that a lot of my very talented Staff Engineer colleagues do not feel like this. So maybe this is just me… and that’s all right.

I am an Android Engineer at heart and I had deep deep technical skills in that area until I transitioned to being a Staff Engineer. People talk about being T shaped but I’ve gone from being this shaped:

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to this shaped:

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and it sucks balls. Well I jest. It doesn’t. But it is a big shock. For a large part of my career I have drawn confidence in that I am a really good Android Engineer. At least that’s what my mother tells me. But going from being known for one specialism to… well to not being known for anything in particular but a bit of everything was a real shock. A knock to the confidence to be sure. It was an even worse knock to the confidence when nobody in my company (I stress in my experience of it) understood what a Staff Engineer was, “Why are you here?”… yes, why am I here?

The real turning point for me was finding other Staff Engineers in the company and discovering what we humorously refer to as our therapy group. Every two weeks we jump on a call and just chat. We rant, we chat, we rant and chat and rant. Rant rant rant, chat chat chat. You get the idea. This helped me in two ways: not feeling alone and knowing there are exceptional people in my company that can help with precisely the issues I am facing.

Someone linked a post from Alex Ewerlöf Notes which in turn led me to discovering Will Larson’s Staff Engineer book and his blog Irrational Exuberance. Both these resources are treasure troves of really good practical advice that I have drawn on to navigate the parts of being a Staff Engineer that isn’t directly being an Engineer.

The transition has been hard I won’t lie. But I do feel rewarded and I am getting used to this new life. I still wish I did more Android Engineering and specifically I really want to tackle our build speed issues… but I think what really matters is that someone does. It doesn’t necessarily have to be me any more. I can, and have, helped shape these initiatives. Which leaves me free to shape and champion other Engineers in other initiatives at the same time. That’s probably going to be my life for the next few years. Not directly doing the work… but opening the way for others to shine.